Results tagged “business” from Appleseed Blog

Here is a Making Light thread with interesting commentary, built on an essay by Jon Stokes on "IT consumerizaton and the future of work". Lots of good discussion on how technologies sold directly (or, in Googlish cases, made freely available) to consumers nowadays easily outpaces the technology and work-paradigms typically found in offices and enforced by IT departments, often by a factor of years.

For me, it brings to mind the continually increasing feasibility of distributed work environments, where a professional team doesn't work together nine-to-five in a physical office, but instead works wherever they happen to be, applying their own resources as they see fit, and using the internet to collaborate. I find this sort of discussion serendipitous, as I'm just starting to move Appleseed towards this sort of configuration, slowly and carefully bringing colleagues on-board as fellow consultants. It's a trend I've been noticing among several other newer, information-based businesses like mine.

The goal in our case is to allow Appleseed to serve more customers, without diminishing our level of personal attention to each. But I want to do it without sacrificing the independence I've enjoyed - and which has directly translated into higher-quality work for Appleseed's customers - since I launched the business, nor would I ask the same sacrifice from anyone I work with.

It's not something that's going to work for every kind of business. While a distributed office must maintain a minimal set of IT-style standards in order to keep all its team members synchronized, there's still a need for everyone to serve as their own personal system administrators. This is a lot easier to pull off if the company happens to be in the software consulting biz.

The results so far have proved quite promising. I feel quite confident about Appleseed's continued growth as both a great source of software expertise and a great place to work. (Sorry, though; no "careers" link on our website header just yet. :) )

Following my previous post, another consultant I work with mailed me to reveal himself as another FreshBooks fan, and pointed me to a free Mac OS X dashboard widget the service offers that obviates the need to use their web-based timer. My goodness! That's quite cool. This may be the first dashboard widget (beyond Apple's own orange calculator) I actually make regular use of.

I just sent out my first invoice via FreshBooks, an online time tracking and billing tool that a colleague recommended to me earlier. So far, I really like it! I'm impressed that it's an ad-free service that seems to make all its money by selling you things around the fringes, like the ability to accept online payments or send out invoice hardcopies via postal mail, while keeping all its core features free of charge. Same colleague suggested that it starts charging when you add a number of active clients beyond a certain limit, but if so, I haven't hit that yet. [Update: OK, I found it. It's free so long as you manage three or fewer clients with it, and then they require you buy into a monthly subscription.]

When I first went independent last year, my time-tracking system involved the clock on the wall and a text file full of date-grouped clusters of stop/start times, and my billing system was just rote re-use of the invoice template that ships with the Pages word processor. After a few months, I switched to using SlimTimer, a minimal-but-functional AJAX-based time tracker, which served me well for about half a year. The monthly, manual translations of lists of labeled time chunks into invoice tables was still a pain, though.

FreshBooks's timer, I have discovered, is at least as nice as SlimTimer's, and it's very easy to dump the information that it collects into nice-looking invoices, which it can then go ahead and mail to your clients for you. I am likely to stick with FreshBooks for a while.

Appleseed has a new phone number: (866) 620-5694. I've updated the contact pages throughout this website to point at that rather than the older number.

The older one was, in fact, my personal cell number. I've used that as my sole phone pointer through my entire career as an independent consultant, and it suited me fine. However, as soon as I launched and began publicizing this new website, I began receiving cold calls from hopeful vendors and other b2b types on my cell, and that just wouldn't do.

The new number will help me better sort and field the increase in call volume that comes with having a new business web presence. It's toll-free from anywhere within the US, so it ought to prove a bit more convenient to my callers as well.

Customers and contacts to whom I freely give my cell number are, of course, welcome and encouraged to continue using it!